


By the Pool

by Skirjis



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: F/M, First Time, Knotting, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Nymphs & Dryads, One Shot, Other, Sexual Content, Smut, Wolf Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:13:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29313882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skirjis/pseuds/Skirjis
Summary: First time writing this kind of thing, pretty nervous and new to AO3. I know this isn't directly fanfic in the strictest sense but I'm giving it a go on here since it involves kind of existing conceptual frameworks that exist in fan work. Thanks for taking the time to read.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	By the Pool

I don’t know what kept me there. Maybe it was the memories of the old days.  
  
Back then, all the days felt like summer. I remember all the trees lush, every breeze filled with the scent of flowers, hot earth, and bark. I was just a pup, of course. One of many. My memories flash like the light between trees when we ran through the forest, flash like my vision did, peering through our many moving legs. Every day felt like a celebration. It didn’t matter if we were chasing bucks or butterflies: every race and every struggle was a joy, and the air was filled with the yips of our laughter. Laughing, running. Tumbling in play, playing in chase. I think that’s what I remember most, was the running. We could run forever, and the whole land felt as if it was ours. We would run until we could run no more, until night would fall and the moon would rise, and our people would turn their eyes heavenward and sing.  
  
The nights were as full of our song as the day was our laughter. Even on the cold nights, when snow would fall, our life felt just as abundant and joyous as it ever had. Even when the air was chill and would bite my nose and our fur would grow thick, I don’t think I really knew what winter was. I know now.  
  
In those cold nights, I remember seeing the adults—Mother and Father I thought of them, but every adult was a Mother or a Father to any of us young ones, whether they were in actuality or not—curling up in tight knots with each other. Tails and arms and ears and lumps all one mass. They had their pile, and we had ours. I remember the rush of small breaths all around me, the press of bodies, fur on fur, warmth on warmth, all steady with sleep when the singing was through. I remember being one of the last awake. There was a foot pressing on my stomach but I didn’t mind it. I remember the air crystal clear and sniffing at its sharpness and stillness. I was searching for the scents of other living things, wondering if we were truly as alone as we felt that night, but I couldn’t smell anything besides the musk of our own body. That was the first time I had noticed it. Prior to that moment, it had been this ever-present, and thus invisible force telling me things I knew in my bones but never needed to put thought to. But now I smelled it. It was familiar in a way my brain wished to filter out, but in noticing, there were new facets that demanded my attention. Males and females smelled different, I realized, but at that point I couldn’t tell which was which. And the adults smelled different than us younger ones, though I would never be able to define how. I could smell, suddenly, that some of us in the younger pile were beginning not to belong there anymore. I began to wonder if maybe I was among those on the cusp, but was perturbed to realize that I didn’t know; I didn’t know my own smell from the rest. In that disorientation, began to wonder at my body, to ascertain where my limbs reached, how large I was, what pieces of smell and sensation belonged to me. But I was lost. I couldn’t do it. I knew I felt warmth, I felt heat, I felt softness and tickle of hair against my face, I felt little prods, and little breaths, but I couldn’t tell where my body stopped an another began. I could feel the deep hollowness of my own chest, but which heartbeat was mine and which was the one belonged to the body I rested upon was a mystery. I think that perhaps, if I had been something different from what I am, I would have felt afraid. Perhaps I would have found a moment like that disorienting. Instead, I felt for the first time alive. It seemed a wonderful thing I had just discovered, this dizzying ambiguity of intimate sensation. My senses were alight trying to figure out where, exactly, was my physical extent, and each quest of sight or touch or smell drew me deeper into this marvelous, mysterious whole. I think that was when I learned what I was. I learned what being a part of the Wolf People meant: it was this kind of togetherness. This lack of differentiation between self and other, young and old, Father or Mother, one body and the next. There was only us. That had been the best feeling of my life.  
  
Of course, the days changed and I grew. One day I ran with such a joyous abandon all my friends—all the other young ones fell long away behind me. My legs were long and my body strong and when I came back to the place that was our home, the adults laughed and shouted with joy and kissed me each one in turn, and I knew then that I was one of them now, and in that moment felt like I always had been. In truth, very little changed, that day. Very little changed at all, except for those odd and frenzied seasons when my nose began to itch as the scents between male and female grew. We’d all grow so antsy with the ache of this oft-forgot but now painfully irritating differentiation among us that I’d join the piles of the rest of them, snarling with pain and delight as we shoved our bodies back together until we each forgot which was which. We’d only remember pesky differences of anatomy again in the springtime when the new wave of pups would come.  
  
Perhaps that was why I was always fascinated by the nymphs. They, of course, were nothing like us. In my youth they were abundant, though rarely seen most of the year, for they hardly ever emerged from their fens and pools. In truth there was little about them to notice or care for, except for those brief weeks in the fall, beneath the light of the moon. Then, the nymphs would rise up from the depths and would bask just beneath the water, or at the edge of it, sprawling on banks or half-submerged logs or rocks. I remember being surprised at how many of them seemed to appear out of nowhere. I remember the glistening of their wet, bare-looking bodies, the alure of the translucent patterns of their skin. Their long sheets of hair dripping from their heads over their backs. Their thick, strong tails. I remember their own songs they would hum, how different they sounded from ours. And I remembered how those songs changed when the flocks of Bird People would descend upon them, and the humming songs would turn into a cacophony of chirrups and cries. In my youth, I found it fascinating, but I didn’t understand it. To me, their noises and behavior seemed much like that of insects swarming in the summer time—riotous, bizarre, meaningless, and ephemeral. As a youth, I was fascinated by the rush, the confusion, the desperation and oddity of it all. It was only when I became older that I realized that this yearly chaos was their mating.  
  
I hardly believed it at first. Perhaps because the males and the females seemed so different from each other as to be entirely different species. Our own pairings (which were not so strictly pairings, for a start), were more an exercise in reasserting sameness between us—well, perhaps not sameness, but unity. An annual practice of making physical what was so ever-present and obvious in the spiritual: that there was no telling where one started and the other began. That we were all of one body and one whole. Male and female was inconsequential to that larger whole. It was a distinction rewarded only in the act of it being lost.  
  
When I realized all the nymphs rising from the water were of one kind of body, and all the fliers descending from the heavens were of another, I could hardly conceive of it. It was more bewildering yet to discover that for this brief window in time, these two different beings from entirely different worlds would find each other for a fierce and violent joining that seemed both frightening and miraculous. Among the Wolf People, the days and seasons were in most ways all the same. But as I grew and watched the nymphs, I saw the patterns of the seasons emerge in ways that were wonderful and foreign. In the late summer, I’d begin to see flashes of the nymphs below the water. They kept themselves well hidden the rest of the year, but then beneath the moon, I’d see the ripples left by their tails as they swam. I’d see the tops of their heads poke up as they sniffed the air, nostrils flaring with little sprays of water before they’d sink back under. A few weeks later, some would begin to find their basking spots, but would slip shyly back under the water again anytime something approached them. I later learned to watch from afar, but in the early days, I was bold in my curiosity. I would come and watch them on the edge of their pools until whatever force compelled them to the surface became too strong to bother heeding my presence. They’d slide from the water soundlessly. They’d crowd onto the shores in hundreds, pushing against each other, pushing close to me. They were beautiful creatures—border creatures, too, like Wolf People were. But where our shared traits with humanity lay in our size, our quick minds, our language, the flexibility in our shoulders and hips and the cleverness in our pawed hands, the nymphs appeared more squarely a cross between them and newts. Their bodies were mostly human in size and shape—limby and lithe—and they had long, silky strands cascading from their heads over otherwise entirely hairless, and thoroughly amphibian features. Their legs were slightly short, hands and feet tubby, broad, and slightly webbed. Their faces were eerie—perhaps alien, but I loved to look at them nonetheless. They had large, wide-set, beguiling and somehow friendly looking eyes, over broad, flat noses which would open or pinch closed like a seal. Their whole heads looked somewhat broad and streamlined, perhaps the way a cat’s might to a dog. But what I loved most about them was their skin. It was nothing like the dull, clay-like texture that humans had. Their skin was rich with subtle, earthy color that seemed to shimmer and morph and shine with the depth of opal or polished wood. It carried faint spots, stripes, mottles and patterns that came alive in the moonlight. That skin is what made them disappear in the swirling sediments beneath the water. And under the moonlight, it nearly glowed. It looked as smooth and as delicate as a bubble or an oil sheen. It made every line of their form, every fold and crease of their skin, every mound of flesh and every rise of bone cast a spell.  
  
It was impossible not to watch them, not to be drawn in by the alien and beautiful sight of them crowding the banks, twisting together in writhing masses, trying to satisfy a need for contact. They would press against one another, clinging and rubbing desperately until their frustration grew too great, and then they would break apart and turn belly-up and spread-limbed to the sky, baring themselves, waiting. That was when I noticed—it was impossible not to—that between their legs at the top of their tails they each had a swollen little cleft. I searched for males among them but found none, until the calls came from the sky. The Bird People would circle above for a long while. I was too enchanted with their stately, winged dance to realize they were searching out a nymph that pleased them, but when one would find her, he would drop from the sky like an eagle. I always feared in that moment, for instead of arms, they had great wings, and their feet were just as a strong and taloned as a falcon. As they reached for the delicate mass of bodies below, it seemed impossible that blood would not be drawn. But before he reached the ground and fell upon one, his wings and tail would flare in a breaking motion, and his legs would reach to pin or straddle. And in that flashing second of spread, I saw it, like a dull, red thorn, descend. It looked nothing like a thorn in truth, but it’s what I was always reminded of, with its imminent throbbing and penetration. But I never saw the moment happen, as it was lost in a shuffling of feathers and high-pitched keens.  
  
More and more would plummet from the sky like shooting stars, and the night would erupt in staccato sounds. Each pairing would be over in a matter of heartbeats, and the males would ascend to the sky again. Some would drop a second time, or a third. Some would fly off to some roosting place and wait for another night. But every night, they would carry on this way, disappearing before the dawn, reappearing after the moon reached its peak. I wondered how many times each of them mated. Far more than seemed pleasurable to me, and yet night after night, the nymphs would drag themselves to shore as if they craved it, as if compelled. Until one night, as if it had never happened, the Bird Men would not come, and the nymphs would not rise. The spell was broken, and the night and the pools went back to their stillness.  
  
That was, until the early spring. I still hardly saw the nymphs, only in the barest glimpses. But I would begin to see the places where they hid their eggs. Some they kept clustered beneath the surface of the water in bowers of reeds. Others would be discovered forming hard shells after being buried in little mud nests on the beach. When the weather warmed, the eggs would disappear and out of their hiding places emerged creatures that looked nothing like either parent, and nothing at all like human stock either. Those born on land, with the jerky, awkward motions of a lizard, would crawl their way up trees, gorging on fruit and insects until they fledged. But the ones born in the water, we never saw again, until some years later a new crop of nymphs would emerge, the patterns on their skin the brightest of all, clinging to each other with a raw edge to their desperation as if the world of the surface burned with sensation, and they needed other bodies to shield and soften it. “How could they not?” I thought to myself often. They were furless, lonely. I would clutch at others and hum for comfort too, if I was as vulnerable as they. It was a life that left me feeling both enchantment and pity.  
  
Their annual dances were the time-markers of the seasons for many years. But then the world began to change. The summer air of my childhood began to smell of new things: smoke and dry leaves, instead of flowers and earth. Our chases became less joyous. We could not run and laugh all day as we had, when there was nothing to catch at the end of it, and our stomachs would rumble through the nights. It became lean, and in our anger, we would fight one another. It was unnatural for our people to turn against ourselves, but conflicts would arise, and little knots of people would be driven off who knows where. And then the autumn came, and when the nymphs rose, there were only a few of them. When the Bird folk came, in flocks just as fierce and lightning-like as ever, their numbers crowded the shores, and they fought with one another over the few females at the banks. I remember being horrified when that year, for the first time, I saw blood drawn on their aerial dives; horrified when I’d see the nymphs, after being swooped upon again and again, try to crawl their way back to the water to safety only to be mobbed by their males and dragged back to shore and overcome again and again till their bodies were tired and battered and limp.  
  
I don’t know what went so wrong in the world to lead to that, but those nights when I saw the scene, I knew the world was changed forever. That winter, my pack’s numbers dwindled. I remember one night as we shivered in the cold, we couldn’t sleep. Our fur was thin, and there was little comfort in curling together, because I felt only the prod of bones. We would shiver and be restless, and so none of us slept. I was exhausted. But one of us stood. “I’ve had enough. I’m going to hunt. Come with me.”  
  
“So late?” “Where will you go? You will not find anything.” “Stay and try to rest.”  
  
“It’s useless. I would rather run until I find something, or run until I can no longer, than lay here and whither and fail to sleep. This is not what we are.”  
  
The others said nothing for a time, but eventually, others stood, and shook themselves, and took a place side by side, squinting against the biting wind. “If we run, we will be warm. And if we run until we are too tired to go on, then at least we will catch some sleep.”  
  
I stayed curled into a ball. Their talk frightened me. Somehow I knew that they would run and they would not come back. They would run until the found a new land, either a land where there was something to eat again, and where the trees kept their green, or a land beyond this life, where their spirits would run forever and ever. They would leave home, and never look back, and run beyond our little winter copse, and run far beyond the wetland pools, and forget as best they could the memories of grass and laughter.  
  
“Aren’t you coming?” they said to me as the shook the snow from their necks. I only curled tighter and shook my head. “No. I will wait for you here.”  
  
Their yellow eyes held condemnation, and a sad goodbye. But all they said was “suit yourself.” They galloped away, the sounds of their footsteps muted by the snow and wind, the last I saw of them, the flash of moonlight between their legs.  
  
I was alone from then on. How I survived that winter, I’ll never know. I never knew such a loneliness in my life. I felt like my solitude made me something new. I wandered the woods like a wraith creature, and I felt the borders of my sense of self harden at the edges. I picked some sort of living off the bones of the trees. Eventually the ice melted and the land softened and instead of starvation I discovered I could find my own way again. Mean, tenacious little buds emerged, and though the insects gobbled them up, somehow life persisted. And so did I. I don’t know how long I drifted through that expanse of meager existence. With no pack, with no change or joy in my day to day, it felt as though it were an eternity. Perhaps it was years.  
  
Eventually I gained some sort of peace. The ache of loneliness seemed to dull, and I somehow found myself more or less resigned to my station. I never did discover what drove the animals and the nymphs away, and my pack never did return. But somehow on my own, running the empty paths, inhabiting all the old places, I felt like a sentinel, and in that I was content.  
  
I would often return to all the old places I would wait and wander. So it was not strange to find myself laying on the banks of the old pools at the wetlands where I used to rest, staring into their murky depths. The waters had been still and quiet for so long. I was shocked when I saw the waters ripple, and a large, wide pair of eyes peek above the surface and disappear again. I sat frozen by the pool wondering if my imagination had conjured up the image, and after waiting there for the rest of the day, I determined that I had. But when I passed by the pool again some days later, I caught sight of her, half in, half out of the water. She slipped away as soon as she saw me, and I knew I would not see her again that day even if I waited for her all night, but my heart leapt with excited disbelief. Was it nearing autumn again? I hardly knew, for the whole world seemed perpetually stuck on the precipice of winter. Had the nymphs returned? Or had she been the last of them, waiting beneath the water until her time was ripe, only to emerge into a world where she was the only one that remained? I knew for certain the bird folk had stopped coming. Perhaps they would never come back. It filled me with such a pang to know that she would forever be solitary, forever be longing. I wished I could speak to her, to tell her no one was coming, tell her that it would be better if she followed the stream that trickled slowly out of the fen, and let it carry her to new waters.  
  
I watched from a far distance every day. Each day should would bask a little longer at the water’s edge. Eventually I satisfied myself that aside from her, the waters were indeed empty of nymphs. Every day I would perch myself on a little knoll just over the fen, and watch her. She was the only other sentient creature I’d seen for so long. She was like some fairy vestige from another life, a memory made flesh and abandoned in a cruel and empty world.  
  
I don’t know if she sensed me, but perhaps after her long, lonely days of basking and my quiet, patient days of watching, she grew used to me. She was always shy, and I could never get too close, but over time the distance shrank, and she seemed to tolerate my observations. If I opened my mouth to speak to her, she would disappear once more and so I had to learn to content myself with silence. But I think we took comfort in each other’s presence.  
  
And so I saw as her behavior transformed under the demands of her biology. At first, her basking seemed curious and at ease. Discovering a new realm, more interested in the feel of mud and the brush of grasses and the soft kiss of breeze and the sounds of birds. But as time grew, she seemed more restless. The patterns on her skin grew bright and would shimmer in more hypnotic glory than I had remembered any of the other nymphs. I could see the way those patterns jumped when her skin trembled at the lightest touch of a passing insect, or against the scratch of stone. Her skin began to always quiver as the days passed, alight with sensitivity that went unshielded by peers. I saw the tension in her as she would curl and sigh, craving contact that would overwhelm, if it were to ever come. Eventually her longing gave rise to a hum, the same song I remembered filling the nights for weeks. But it was so much yearning and small, all alone. Like a desperate, painful whisper. It pulled at me. It made my own heart hurt for her solitude, and for my own. I ached for the when the nights were filled with the songs of my own people. I remembered again, after years of deadened senses, that ravenous itch, satisfied only when my people would come together in those tumbling rhythms. It made me want to shield her body from the world with my own, it made me want to join her song, and through it, tell her the tale of our mourning. But when I would stand or raise my voice, she’d slip again back into the water.  
  
But this time, I waited for her on the bank. Her need would drive her form the water eventually, and I would tell her then, tell her softly that what she was waiting for would never come. Tell her I was sorry, and tell her of my piteous life of solitude, and hope she could find herself a better one.  
  
But as I waited the more restless I became. And when finally she rose from the water and pulled herself along the banks, her eyes met mine. They held a look in them I didn’t know how to understand or describe. She looked wary and suspicious. She looked angry, bitter, and defeated. She looked hopeful, shy, sad, and trusting. Like a surrender, like a capitulation, she pulled her body up before me, eyes closing against the rasp of earth against her skin, curling against the sensory onslaught, before twisting and rolling onto her back, waiting. I saw the delicacy of her then, the youth, the fear, the innocence she felt before urges far older and more powerful and mysterious than she. Commanded by circumstances she couldn’t control. Her whole body trembled, and I could see the wet and swollen parts of her bared to the sky. I wasn’t what she needed. But I was what she had.  
  
I couldn’t tell if it was an offer or a challenge. I wanted to explain that we weren’t the same, that we didn’t belong to each other, that our songs followed different meanings. But I felt frozen, too. I was more practiced with being alone perhaps than she, but in that moment, in our lost sameness, I was weak. I felt myself moving over her, shifting, arranging our two bodies that were never meant to fit together. I felt clumsy. Awkward. But when I lowered my hips to hers, she rose to meet mine. I began to wiggle and thrust, settling lower, feeling the unprotected pieces of ourselves bumping and sliding against each other. I wondered if the downy fur of my inner thighs felt like feathers against her skin as I pressed down. The tip of me slipped between the folds of her cleft, and with a force that seemed to come from outside of me, I felt my body swell as I surged in.  
  
We gasped, both of us. Her body tensed and writhed against me but I’d lost what control I had to those rapid, ancient forces. I was thrusting fast, hips pinning her hard against the ground as a moved, lost in some spasm of pulse and motion. I felt her body clenching, tightening around me, squeezing hard, her hums broken into little chirping cries. I felt my own body swelling helplessly, knotting, pulse pounding outward against her but with no place to go.  
  
The bird folk had finished quickly and soared away again when they were through. But I was panting, captured, trembling, stuck, afraid for her and for myself as I felt the base of me grow, the exquisite, thirst-quenching pain of my fullness trapped within her. It was nearly too much for her. She was twisting, moaning, pulling away, but her struggles only further excited our arousal. Each of us yipped our pained, uneven sounds. Each time one of us tried to tug apart, seeking respite from the overwhelming lock, a flare of urgency brought our bodies pressing back together, pounding against each other wildly. The intensity of it drained us both. Finally, we stilled, spent, hoping that a moment of rest would ease our enflamed anatomy enough to separate. My body was trembling. My head hung over her low, panting. She quivered, making small, whimpering sounds, and waited.  
  
I’m sorry, I panted. My voice came out low, raspy and growling. I was afraid she wouldn’t understand me. I’m sorry. She wasn’t built for this. I wasn’t built for her, and I don’t know what I had been thinking. Delicately, cautiously, I tried to lift my hips, testing whether I might be released from her. She was laying heavy against the ground, gravity should have helped us, but the lock was too tight. My lift carried her with me and she yelped softly, and I had no choice but to ease back down.  
  
But I was so spent, I could hardly hold myself up any longer. The weight of her pulled me lower, and my forelimbs splayed. I tried to settle beside her on the ground, rather than over her, hoping to rest—what else was there for me to do, until the knot subsided? But as I lowered, she shifted. I felt her arms wrap around me, and her tail curl around my back legs, holding me tightly. I felt her head nuzzle into my shoulder, half hiding in her shyness, half seeking comfort in this moment of exposure and extremity. Her clutch was fierce but tentative. I could feel how stubborn, how desperate it was in her vibrating muscles and the twitching of her skin. The feel of her twisting body around me reminded me of the sight of years past. I remembered seeing clutches of nymphs twisting around each other, clamoring for sensation, clamoring from protection from the onslaught. I remembered them curling around each other, resting together, waiting. It made me remember my pack, the piles we’d form, of being lost in a sea of others. If either of us could cry, I think we would have. But I knew then it would be cruelty to pull away from her again.  
  
And so I lowered myself over her, onto her, resting over her form, covering her body with mine. I remembered the Bird people had sheltered the motion of their bodies with their wings, and I hoped for a moment, that she felt sheltered by me. Hoped that the brushes of my fur against her skin would be soft, would bring safety and warmth. I felt her limbs and tail tighten. I felt her press her face into the deep fur of my chest. And oddly, I felt some of the tension ease from both of our bodies. I felt her fingers clench, digging into the fur at my neck. And somehow, something in that moment changed.  
  
Our bodies were still sealed together so tightly, I was still hesitant to move. But some notion, some awakening was growing within me, and I felt myself press down into her gently once more. A sound like a whimper or a sigh escaped her. Soft, and welcoming. I pressed again, and I swore I felt something within her change.  
  
A ripple seemed to pass over my shaft lodged within her. When I thrust slowly a third time, I felt it again. A rolling sort of clenching motion that tugged along the length of me and sent shivers up both of our spines. Learning from sensation, our bodies began to move together again, more slowly this time, riding the motion like soft waves. The drawing sensations made my mind go blank. Our motions, though steady, grew more heated. The pleasure crept up on us slowly, but thoroughly, laying claim to our limbs and voices as we shuddered and released. We each lost ourself in a spread of wetness between our legs—I felt the clenching, milking motions of her insides drawing at me, felt myself pumping deep into her, and I felt from her a sort of shudder and gush of hot fluid around me. And with that loss of tension, I felt our bodies relax and slide apart, still full, and wet, and raw with sensitivity, still swollen and tender. I felt my body drag along her thigh as I flopped out, trailing a thick string of semen from the tip. I felt her limbs and tail unclench and slide from around me as breath flowed back into each of our lungs. And then we separated.  
  
I was jittery with pleasure and fatigue. I collapsed on the ground, expecting with some amount of sadness to see her slip back into the water. To my surprise, she lay there a moment more on her back, recovering while I watched her sex pulse and tremble with aftershocks from the experience. Seeing her body up close like this, after years of watching from afar… after what we had just experienced, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I feasted on the sight of the place where we had joined, the place where signs of our union still dripped and trailed from her. The place that still clenched at the emptiness and tremored at the air. She caught me looking at her. I thought for sure that would send her hiding from me. Instead she made a small sound that reminded me of a chuckle, and shifted her legs in a passive, inviting way. I dragged my heavy head nearer to that intriguing place. Her skin glistened all the more for the fluids we’d shared. I found myself considering it somewhat unfair that her body would carry within it a reminder of this experience, but that I should carry nothing. Perhaps because of that selfish urge, I found myself lowering my mouth to her pursing entrance, extending my tongue to pass along and between her folds. She moaned, and I lapped slowly at her, tasting the salty, tangy mix of our exchange. Feeling the slick smoothness of a skin so yielding and responsive. I lapped at her until she shuddered and convulsed once more, and this time she rolled back over onto her belly, shielding her sensitive places from further stimulus. I watched as she slowly, coyly slipped back into the pool. But she didn’t disappear right away. She lingered just under the surface for a time, before with a flick of her tail, she sent a spray of water my direction before sinking into the depths.  
  
I lingered there though I knew, at least for the day, that I would not see her again. But I had to stay there to convince myself that it had truly happened. I shouldn’t have needed such convincing—my erection still throbbed and it took a long time before it calmed enough to slip back into the skin of its sheath. But even so, it had been so unexpected, so bizarre that I couldn’t quite fathom that it hadn’t been some sort of a dream.  
  
Eventually I left the pond. I ate and slept and roamed the day as I normally would. But as evening came on again, it drew me back. And when I reached the wetlands as the moon was high, I found her waiting for me.  
  
It took us several more tries before the tentativeness left us, before we got used to the overpowering clench of our joining. Those early times were much like the first, drawn together by a sort of compulsion, tied together in a frenzy of instinct, and painfully, half-panicked, find our bodies trying to find some relief or escape from the ravenous bond. Those moments always left me with an odd little lurch of fear—we weren’t meant for each other, our bodies weren’t made for this—but with effort we would relax, seek out that odd sort of comfort, and rediscover our pleasure, parting in a trembling, wet rush. However, after those first few times, the fear began to subside, and curiosity began to hunger in its place. Even exhausted, we’d find ourselves gravitating together once again, examining each other’s bodies, prodding at our swollen places, trying to fit them together once more as if in one more attempt, we might be able to decode this call our bodies answered in one another. Eventually we grew bold with each other. I would come upon her fiercely, quickly, persisting in my frenzied motions even when our bodies were locked at their tightest. Sometimes when we were held together, she would pull away from me almost teasingly, as if she was trying, without really wanting, to break our bodies apart at that height of fullness. In those moments, rich keening sounds of pleasure would rise from her, and unbidden, equal moans would bubble out as howls from my throat. We learned to savor those moments after our sliding apart at last, each of us rushing to the throbbing sex of the other to investigate, taste, touch, and play at our most tremulous and intense. Eventually, she didn’t leave me for the water so quickly, and we’d find moments of peace and comfort curled together as we’d rest after our separation. Sometimes, we would come together so insatiably that we would hold the lock. One night, we came together so many times and with such a vigor, that when our bodies knotted together, we collapsed and fell asleep, and laid like that in our tie until we woke before the sunrise, still bonded, and I began thrusting into her anew, having never left. One night, I was so exhausted from our efforts that I slept the day away. I woke to discover her investigating between my legs, sipping at the rising tip she’d coaxed up, experimenting by bringing her cleft to it in new ways. I obliged her happily, letting her pass her body over me until the teasing pleasure was too much, and I rolled her onto her back to ravish her once more.  
  
Toward the end, our pace slowed. Our fervor had kept us from our schedule of rest and food, so our stamina wasn’t what it was at the beginning. I began to sense that our time was running out, this strange season of passion and comfort between us drawing to a close. I found myself wondering if it might be possible that she never have to return to the pool, that she could somehow join me on land. But I knew nothing of her needs outside of this brief season, and I doubted she could make a life on land any more than I could beneath the water. It made me sad and wistful. In some moments it made me frightfully angry and bitter. Why should our lives take everything we longed for away from each of us? What reason was there in the world for us to find this odd, wordless, perhaps unnatural, but ultimately life-affirming bond between us which saved us from our solitude and loneliness—us two creatures that so desperately needed others like ourselves—only to be driven apart by circumstance? It seemed too cruel. But perhaps the nymph possessed some greater knowledge than I, because she seemed to look forward to each future moment with a sort of unabashed acceptance I couldn’t share.  
  
I think she knew first when the night arrived that would be our last. She said nothing, and little in her actions changed, but somehow, I felt it. When I took my place over her body, I entered her slowly, and pushed deeper into her with a steady rhythm. I kept the pace measured and even, and I didn’t stop. I felt our bodies swell together, I felt the tension rise, I felt those coursing sensations of pleasure before our release, I felt our pulsing as our bodies relaxed, and still I thrust even and slow. We could have slipped apart then, but I didn’t. I let my body continue to slide in and out of her until the arousal coursed again, and our bodies locked once more, until we strained at the tightness and ultimately shuddered and we emptied ourselves into and onto each other, and once again relaxed. And I did it again. And again. Each time, the pleasure that cascaded over and between us grew, the sensations growing more and more intense for the repetition. I believed, in some strange way, that if we could continue on like this, that somehow the morning would be kept at bay. But I was weaker than the dawn. Eventually, I slid from her in a collapse, half forced out from her body by the pressure of the fluids I’d pumped into her over the course of the hours. She could have left me then, I’m sure her nerves were frayed from the abundance and persistence of our motions, but she stayed curled against my side until I was asleep, for which I was grateful.  
  
But in the morning, she was gone.  
  
I was bitter when I woke alone. I howled for a long while at the edge of the pool. I don’t know if she heard me. Eventually I left the pond.  
  
A lonely, horrid winter came and passed. I hardly cared. The world felt truly empty now, and winter seemed as if it was all that ever was, or ever would be.  
  
That was, until I walked the melted woods one day. There was a smell in the air that tickled at my senses, something from long ago. I followed the scent for miles as it led me out of the mountain places and back into the lowlands by the pool. I didn’t dare hold hope for seeing my nymph waiting for me near the riverbanks, so I only felt a dull ache of disappointment when the places were indeed empty of her presence. But something about them captured my attention and drew me forward anyway.  
  
There were flowers growing by the water’s edge. Tiny white flowers that spilled over the ground in patches like puddles where we had bred. And as the sun grew higher and shown on them, the earth warmed. The scent of flowers and warm soil filled my nose again for the first time in years, and without realizing, I found myself laughing. A joy bubbled up in me, and the only thing to let it out was to run about the pool in foolish, fervid circles, yipping as I raced. Spring had come again, against all odds. I knew our shared moments of desperation had not brought it back in truth, but still, it seemed fitting that in the place where I shared moments that made me feel alive after so long, that it would invite more life to return. It made me feel like singing. And though I was alone as I had ever been over the previous years, I looked forward to summer.  
  
Because inside me like some waiting secret, I knew summer would come in its fullness. And after that, the fall. And when the moon rose heavy and round over the pools again, I knew she would rise, and there, would find me waiting.


End file.
